Tag: writing

In Rivendell, the ground shook.

It was not a great sensation. It was merely a tremor, a shudder, the sort of thing that might have been mistaken for a cart passing on a nearby road. But the water in the fountains rippled, and the leaves of the ancient trees trembled without wind, and the light, the clear, golden light that always lay upon the valley of Imladris, suddenly dimmed, as if a cloud had passed before the sun. But there was no cloud. The sky above Rivendell was clear.

Gandalf felt it first. He was standing on the terrace where Gwaihir had departed that morning, his pipe unlit in his hand, and he had been watching the southeastern sky with an expression of quiet confidence that had been slowly, imperceptibly curdling into something else, something he had not felt in a very long time, something he had almost forgotten the shape of.

Fear.

The tremor passed through the stone beneath his feet, and the doubt became certainty, and the certainty was the worst thing he had ever felt.

Elrond emerged from the house. He did not run because Elf lords do not run, but he moved quickly with the controlled pace of someone who has received terrible news and is walking toward the place where he knows it will be confirmed. He came to stand beside Gandalf on the terrace, and for a long moment neither of them spoke. They looked to the east, toward the shadow on the horizon that was, even now, visibly darker than it had been an hour ago. It was visibly expanding to the north and to the west.

“The shadow grows,” said Elrond.

“Yes,” said Gandalf.

“Then—”

“Indeed.”

Elrond closed his eyes. When he opened them, they held something that Gandalf had never seen in them before, not in six thousand years of their acquaintance, not in the fall of Gil-galad, not in the ruin of Eregion, not even in the moment on the slopes of Orodruin when Isildur had taken the Ring and walked away to his doom. It was not despair, exactly. Elrond was far too old for despair, which is a youthful emotion that requires the ability to believe that things ought to be other than they are. It was something deeper, quieter, and more final.

“The Windlord has fallen,” said Elrond. It was not a question.

Gandalf said nothing. His hand, resting on the stone rail of the terrace, was trembling.

Behind them, in the garden, Frodo Baggins looked up from his book. He did not know what had happened. He did not yet understand the darkness that was gathering on the edge of the world, or the silence that had fallen over Rivendell as if the land itself was holding its breath. But he felt it. He felt the ground shiver, felt the light change, felt something vast and irreversible shift in the deep foundations of the world. The book slid from his hands, and he sat very still, and he was afraid.

On the terrace, Gandalf and Elrond stood side by side and watched the shadow rise in the east, and neither of them spoke, because there was nothing left to say.

The ring had been reclaimed.

The One Ring had returned to its maker.

The darkness was rising.

And soon the dark lord would rule over all Middle Earth.

THE END

And that, my friends, is why JRR Tolkien didn’t simply have the eagles fly the ring to Mordor.

QEFD

DISCUSS ON SG

It came from behind the peak — from the far side of Orodruin, where the mountain’s bulk had hidden it from view — and it rose into the sky above the crater with a slowness that was worse than speed, because speed would have implied effort, and this creature moved as if effort were a concept that applied to lesser things.

Felgarion. Son of Ancalagon the Black.

The dragon was enormous. Not the size of Smaug, who had been large enough to blanket a town in flame, but larger, far larger, a creature from the Elder Days when the world was younger and made things of a scale it could no longer sustain. His wingspan blocked out the sky above the mountain. His scales were green, not the dark green of the elvenwoods but the deep, liquid green of emeralds, and they caught the red light of the fires below and threw it back in dark, bloody reflections. His eyes were gold and slitted and ancient and utterly without mercy. His jaws, when they opened, revealed a throat that glowed like the inside of a forge.

And on his back, between the great ridged spines that ran from skull to tail, sat Sauron.

The Dark Lord had changed. He was no longer a quiet figure in a silk robe, the chess player, the sketcher of sleeping beauty. He wore armor of black steel, chased with lines of red-gold that pulsed with the same rhythm as the mountain beneath him, and on his head sat a crown of iron, and in his hand he carried nothing at all. He wielded neither sword nor spear, because when one rides a dragon, one does not require weapons. He was terrible and beautiful in the way that a fire is beautiful when it engulfs a forest, and his eyes, visible even at this distance, burned with the same lidless intensity as the Eye atop his tower.

The dragon and his rider crested the peak of Orodruin and hung there for a moment, motionless, silhouetted against the column of smoke and ash, and the image was one that would haunt the nightmares of every creature that saw it for as long as they lived, which in some cases would not be very long at all.

Landroval saw it first. The great eagle turned and threw himself without hesitation at the dragon, not because he believed he could harm it, but because Gwaihir was below and still diving for the crack and someone had to buy him time. It was the bravest thing Landroval had ever done. It was also the last thing Landroval ever did.

Felgarion opened his mouth. The fire that came was not the fire of Smaug. It was not the hot, orange, flaming fire of a lesser wyrm. It was the fire of Ancalagon’s line, white at its core, blue at its edges, a fire that had once melted the towers of the Valar’s own fortifications in the War of Wrath. It struck Landroval in midair.

The great eagle was instantly transformed into a torch. His feathers, his flesh, the very structure of his bones — all of it caught and burned with an intensity that turned the eagle from a living creature into a shape of pure flame in the space of a single heartbeat. He did not scream. The fire was burned too fast for screams. He burned, and he fell, and the wind of his falling trailed a long ribbon of white fire down the mountainside like a comet striking the earth, and then he was gone.

Gwaihir did not look back. He could not afford to look back. The entrance to the Sammath Naur was fifty yards ahead, close enough to see the ancient stone of its lintel, close enough to feel the blast of heat from within, and he drove himself toward it with every ounce of strength his fatigued wings could summon.

He did not reach it.

Felgarion descended upon him like a green star falling. The dragon came straight down, folding his wings and dropping with a speed that belied his enormous size, and his claws — each one as long as a ship’s mast, black as volcanic glass and sharp beyond the craft of any smith — closed around Gwaihir’s body from above. The eagle thrashed. His wings beat against the dragon’s grip, his talons raked at the emerald scales, but Felgarion’s claws held him with the casual, immovable strength of the earth itself.

The dragon’s head descended.

His jaws opened, and the teeth — row upon row, black and translucent and curved like scimitars — closed around Gwaihir’s neck. There was a sound. It was a sound that should not be described, because some things are too terrible for language and this was one of them. The Windlord’s headless body went limp in the dragon’s claws.

Felgarion landed on the slopes of Orodruin with a concussion that shook the mountain to its roots. His claws released the broken body of the eagle, and it slid down the black rock and lay still, the great wings splayed and bent, the golden plumage darkened with dirt and ash, the oozing red blood in stark contrast with the exposed white bone of his severed spine.

Sauron dismounted.

He walked to the body of Gwaihir the Windlord, and he knelt beside the left talon, and he unbuckled the pale leather pouch with his nine remaining fingers. The Elven craftsmanship was exquisite. Even in the moment of his triumph, he noted this with the detached appreciation of a fellow artisan.

He opened the pouch, and drew out the Ring.

It was warm. It was always warm. But now, here, on the slopes of the mountain where it had been made, it was more than warm, it was alive, singing in a frequency that resonated with the fire beneath the stone, with the will of its maker, with the vast and ancient design that had begun in the forges of Eregion and was, in this moment, finally and irrevocably complete.

Sauron stood. He raised his fist, his right hand, the one with the missing finger and held the Ring aloft against the burning sky. The mountain roared beneath him. The clouds above Mordor, the great pall of shadow that had hung over the land for years, began to spread across the sky, rolling rapidly outward in all directions like a dark tide unleashed. The Great Eye atop Barad-dûr blazed with an exultant light that could be seen from the Shire to the Sea of Rhûn.

Behind him, Felgarion raised his head and roared, a sound that shook the very foundations of the Ephel Dúath and sent avalanches cascading down every peak in the range, and the Witch-king, circling above on his fell beast, bowed his hooded head.

On the slopes of Mount Doom, in the shadow of his dragon, with the blood of the Windlord at his feet and the One Ring burning in his fist, the Dark Lord of Mordor exulted in his victory.

DISCUSS ON SG

They came to Mordor in the sixth hour.

The clouds broke apart as the eagles crossed the Ephel Dúath, and the land below them was revealed in all its desolation, with the brown, cracked wasteland of the Plateau of Gorgoroth stretching away under a sky of smoke and sullen amber, the dark mass of Barad-dûr rising in the distant northeast like a needle of black iron thrust into the heavens, and there, directly ahead, filling the southern horizon with its vast and terrible shape, Orodruin.

Mount Doom.

The mountain was active. It was always active — had been since Sauron first bent its fires to his will in the forging of the Rings — and now it breathed a column of smoke and ash into the sky that rose miles above the peak and spread into a canopy of darkness that blotted out the sun. The slopes were black and red, veined with rivulets of cooling lava that glowed like infected wounds, and from the fractured cone at the summit a dull orange light pulsed in slow, rhythmic intervals, as if the mountain itself had a heartbeat.

Gwaihir descended. The air thickened as they dropped below the cloud layer — thickened with heat and ash and the acrid stink of brimstone, and the winds became treacherous, gusting unpredictably as thermals off the mountain’s slopes collided with the cooler air from the plateau. The great eagle’s wings adjusted constantly, reading the turbulence with an instinct born of millennia, but even Gwaihir felt the strain. This was not his sky. This was a sky of fire and poison, and every breath of it burned.

Landroval flew on his right. Meneldor on his left. The three eagles were tired — six hours at altitude, at speed, without rest — but the mountain was before them and the Sammath Naur was close, a dark gash in the face of the cone visible now even through the haze of ash. Minutes. They were minutes from the end.

The Witch-king came out of the smoke.

He came from below and to the east, rising on a fell beast that screamed as it climbed — a sound like iron tearing, like the death cry of something that had never truly been alive. He had been waiting in the lee of the mountain, hidden by the ash plume, and his timing was precise. The fell beast’s vast wings beat the fouled air and drove it upward on a collision course with Meneldor, the youngest and outermost of the three eagles, and behind him came two more — Uvatha and Adûnaphel on their own mounts, spreading wide to flank.

“Nazgûl!” The cry came from Landroval, less a word than a shriek in the eagle’s tongue, a sound of warning and fury that cut through the roar of the mountain. Gwaihir banked hard, and the formation broke.

Meneldor turned to meet the Witch-king. It was the brave choice and the wrong one. The fell beast was larger than Meneldor, uglier, and utterly without fear, driven by a will that was not its own, and the Witch-king rode it with the cold expertise of a warrior who had been killing from the air since before the founding of Gondor. They met in a tangle of wings and talons above the eastern slope, and for a moment the two shapes became one, a thrashing, screaming knot of feather and membrane and raking claws, and then they broke apart with Meneldor bleeding.

The wound was along his left side, where the fell beast’s claws had torn through feather and flesh to the muscle beneath. Meneldor’s wing faltered. He dropped, caught himself, dropped again. The Witch-king circled above him, patient, and the fell beast’s mouth hung open, trailing ropes of dark saliva, waiting.

But the Witch-king had made a mistake. He had committed to Meneldor, and in doing so he had left Uvatha and Adûnaphel to deal with Gwaihir and Landroval alone.

They were not enough.

Landroval struck Uvatha’s fell beast from above and behind with the full force of a diving eagle — talons extended, wings folded, falling like a bolt of golden lightning. The impact broke the fell beast’s spine. The sound it made was extraordinary — a wet, structural crunch that was felt as much as heard — and the black-scaled creature folded in on itself like a thing made of paper and fell, spinning, trailing a banner of dark blood, and Uvatha the Horseman, who had once ridden the plains of Khand with an army at his back, fell with it, his black robes streaming behind him, silent, and not without dignity, until the slopes of Orodruin received him and he was gone from the sky.

Gwaihir took Adûnaphel’s mount head-on. The fell beast lunged for him with its serpentine neck and snapping jaws, and Gwaihir caught its long neck in both his talons and wrenched in opposite directions. The fell beast’s neck broke with a sound like a green branch snapping, and Gwaihir released it and beat upward as the dead creature tumbled past him, its wings still twitching in purposeless spasm. Adûnaphel fell screaming, and her screams gradually faded as she plunged into the fires that coursed along the mountain’s lower slopes.

Two Nazgûl down. The Witch-king, seeing his support destroyed in a matter of seconds, pulled back. He drove his fell beast away from the wounded Meneldor and climbed, circling wide, and for a moment the sky above Orodruin was clear.

“Go!” Landroval screamed at Gwaihir. “The crack! Now!”

The Windlord turned toward the Sammath Naur. He could see it clearly — the great opening in the mountainside, dark and wide, lit from within by the deep red glow of the fires below. The air above it shimmered with heat. He folded his wings into a shallow dive, angling his descent toward the entrance, and the pouch on his talon — that small, exquisitely crafted pouch of pale Elvish leather — swung beneath him like a pendulum. Within it, the Ring seemed to pulse, seemed to burn, seemed to cry out in a voice that only the mountain could hear.

Four hundred yards. three hundred. He could feel the heat now, rising from the cone in waves that distorted the air and made the dark opening dance and waver. Two hundred yards. He adjusted his angle, spreading his wings to brake, preparing to stoop through the entrance and release the pouch into the abyss below —

And then the shadow fell over him.

DISCUSS ON SG

For a moment Sauron stood motionless in the dim library, and the only sound was the crackle of the fire and the slow breathing of Lúthiel asleep in her chair. He looked at her. He looked at the sketch on the desk — the careful charcoal lines, the sleeping face, the small frown. He had been happy, he realized. For perhaps an hour, in the quiet of the early morning, drawing a face he had studied for nine hundred years, he had been something very like happy.

He picked up the velvet cloth and covered the palantír. Then he left the library.

The staircase to the upper chamber of Barad-dûr was a spiral of black stone, nine hundred steps from the library level to the pinnacle, and Sauron climbed it at a pace that would have killed a mortal man. The tower narrowed as he ascended. The walls pressed closer. The air grew hotter and heavier, thick with the ambient sorcery that sustained the great working at the tower’s crown, and the darkness itself seemed to acquire texture — to become not merely the absence of light but a substance, a medium, the stuff from which the Eye was woven.

He emerged into the chamber at the top.

It was a circular room, open to the sky on all sides, and in its center stood the iron framework that held the Eye, a vast apparatus of dark metal and darker will, shaped like a lens or a pupil, within which burned the manifestation of Sauron’s searching gaze. When he was not here, the Eye was sustained by stored magics, turning slowly, scanning the horizon with a dim and general awareness. But when he was here at the summit, when he stepped behind the framework and placed his will into it like a hand into a glove, then the Eye blazed.

It blazed now.

The summit of Barad-dûr erupted with sorcery. Not the visible light of sun or star but a radiance of another kind entirely, a piercing, lidless, wrathful power that swept across the plains of Gorgoroth like a searchlight and leapt outward over the mountains of shadow, out across the brown lands and the wilderlands, out over the Misty Mountains and the vales and the rivers, reaching, seeking, burning through cloud and mist and the thin veils of Elvish concealment as if they were tissue.

He found them in less than a minute.

Three golden shapes, high above the clouds, south of the Gladden Fields and descending slowly as they crossed the eastern foothills of the Misty Mountains. They were flying in a loose formation, with the largest in the center and the other two flanking, and they were fast, impossibly fast, the wind of the upper atmosphere carrying them eastward like arrows loosed from a bow of infinite draw.

Gwaihir. He could see the great bird clearly through the Eye, every feather, every beat of those enormous wings, and there, dangling from the left talon, radiated power that reflected the light of the Eye’s own gaze like a mirror reflecting a torch, the Ring. The One Ring. His Ring. The band of gold he had forged in the heart of Orodruin in the time when the Middle Earth was young, into which he had poured his cruelty and his will

For one momentary, burning instant Sauron felt something that was neither fear and nor the cold calculation that had defined his existence for millennia. It was something much closer to fury. The sheer indignity of it astonished him. The supreme masterwork of the Dark Lord, the instrument through which the world would be remade in shadow and fire, hanging from an eagle’s foot like a woman’s ankle-charm, and carted over Middle-earth like a parcel.

The moment passed. The Eye narrowed, and its gaze locked onto Gwaihir with a focus that made the air between them hum, and Sauron began to calculate distances and speeds and the terrible, dwindling arithmetic of time.

The Witch-king would reach Orodruin in time. The fell beasts were slower than the eagles in the open sky, but Minas Morgul was closer to the mountain than Gwaihir was now, and the Nazgûl did not need to catch the eagles, only to be waiting for them when they arrived. It should be enough. But it might not.

Sauron had not survived three Ages of the world by trusting in what might be.

He withdrew his will from the Eye — not entirely, leaving it fixed on Gwaihir like a burning pin through a map — and sent his thought downward. Not to the war rooms or the forges or the barracks. Deeper. Down through the foundations of Barad-dûr, down through the bedrock of the Plateau of Gorgoroth, down into the roots of the earth where the stone was hot and slow and older than memory. Down to the place where something vast had been sleeping since before the tower was built, since before Mordor was Mordor, since the ruin of Thangorodrim and the breaking of the North, when a young dragon had crawled south through the bowels of the world with his father’s fire still burning in his blood and had found, in the deep dark beneath a plain of ash, a place to rest.

Felgarion the Wicked. The green-scaled son of Ancalagon the Black, whose wings had blotted out the sky above Angband, whose fall had broken the towers of Thangorodrim into rubble. Ancalagon was long dead, slain by Eärendil in the War of Wrath, but his son had survived, smaller than his sire but mightier than Smaug, mightier than Glaurung, mightier than any wyrm that had taken to the skies in the recorded Ages of the world. He had slept beneath the foundations of Barad-dûr for five thousand years, dreaming of fire and ruin in the timeless way of dragons, and Sauron had let him sleep, because there had never been a need sufficient to justify waking him.

Until now.

Sauron spoke. Not aloud, for the word he used had no sound, belonging to a language older than the Black Speech, older than the tongues of Elves, a language of pure will that had been spoken in the forges of Aulë before the world was made. It was a name. A command. A promise. It passed through stone and magma and the compacted silence of millennia, and it reached the place where the dragon lay coiled in the dark, his scales green as emeralds, his closed eyes like furnace doors banked and waiting.

And the great beast heard his voice, and woke.

DISCUSS ON SG

In the library of Barad-dûr, the palantír woke.

It sat on a plinth of black iron in the corner of the room, shrouded in a cloth of dark velvet, and it had been silent for days — Sauron used it sparingly, preferring the Eye for broad surveillance and the palantír for directed communication, and there had been no one he wished to communicate with. But now the stone blazed beneath its covering, a sullen red-orange glow that seeped through the velvet like blood through a bandage, and a sound came from it — not a sound, exactly, but a pressure, a tightening of the air, the psychic equivalent of a hand gripping a shoulder.

Sauron looked up from his desk.

He had been sketching. This was not widely known — it was not, in fact, known to anyone except Lúthiel, and she knew better than to mention it — but Sauron was a draughtsman of extraordinary skill. He had been a Maia of Aulë before his fall, a craftsman and shaper of things, and the impulse to create had never left him, even as the objects of his creation had grown darker and more terrible over the millennia. Tonight — or rather, this predawn hour, for Sauron kept no regular schedule and had not slept since approximately the year 1600 of the Second Age — he had been drawing Lúthiel.

She was asleep in the chair across from him, curled with the unconscious grace of an Elf at rest, one hand still resting on a book that had slid from her lap to the floor. He had been working in charcoal on heavy paper, capturing the fall of her hair across the chair’s arm, the particular way the firelight found the line of her jaw, the slight frown she wore even in sleep, as if her dreams were presenting arguments she found unconvincing. It was a good likeness. He was pleased with it.

The palantír pulsed again, and the pleasure evaporated.

He crossed the room in three strides, pulled the velvet aside, and placed his hand on the stone. The surface was hot — not physically, but in the way that a live wire is hot, carrying a current that had nothing to do with temperature. The stone’s depths swirled and cleared, and he saw Ren’s hooded face, and behind it the open sky, and behind that —

Eagles. Three of them. Heading east.

“Speak,” said Sauron.

Ren’s voice came through the stone like a whisper carried on a dead wind. “My lord. Three Great Eagles departed Rivendell at dawn. They climb above the clouds and fly east at speed. The lead eagle carries something on its talon. I can feel it, my lord. The Ring. They carry the Ring.”

Sauron’s hand tightened on the palantír. The stone creaked beneath his grip — an impossible sound from an object that could not be broken by any physical force, but the stone knew its master’s will, and his will in that moment was a thing of terrible, focused violence.

“East,” he said. “How far east? What is their heading?”

“South of east, my lord. Toward —”

“Mordor.”

The word was quiet. The room was quiet. Behind him, Lúthiel stirred in her chair but did not wake. On the desk, the charcoal sketch watched the room with serene, sleeping eyes.

Sauron’s mind moved very fast. It was one of his great advantages — he had been a being of intellect before he had been a being of power, and even now, even after millennia of corruption and diminishment, his capacity for rapid, precise calculation was undiminished. The eagles had departed at dawn. Rivendell was approximately four hundred leagues from Orodruin. Gwaihir’s speed, at altitude, was — he searched his memory, consulted the deep archives of his knowledge of the Maiar and the great beasts — perhaps sixty leagues per hour. Perhaps more, with a following wind.

Six hours. Seven at most.

They were not bringing the Ring to wield against him. They were not marching an army to his gates. They were flying, in the high airs, above the reach of his ground forces, above the reach of most of his aerial forces, straight toward Mount Doom.

They were going to destroy it.

“Gandalf,” he breathed, and for a moment, he found himself almost admiring the boldness of the fool. Not an army. Not a king with the Ring on his finger. An eagle carrying it in its talons. The simplest plan. The most elegant. The one he had not considered because he had been so busy thinking about the realities of power that he had forgotten that his enemies might be frightened enough to throw it away in order to deny it to him.

That thought lasted approximately one and a half seconds. Then Sauron acted.

“Ren. Where is the Witch-king?”

“At Minas Morgul, my lord. With Gothmog’s forces.”

“And the others? How many of the Nine are mounted?”

“The Witch-king has his beast. Uvatha and Adûnaphel are at the Morannon with their fell beasts saddled. The rest are here, near Rivendell.”

Three. Three Nazgûl with fell beasts within striking distance of Mount Doom. It was not enough. It might have to be enough.

“Send the Witch-king to Mount Doom. Now. This moment. He is to take Uvatha and Adûnaphel from the Morannon and fly directly to Orodruin. They are to circle the mountain. Nothing enters the Sammath Naur. Nothing approaches. Do you understand? If an eagle comes within a league of that mountain, they are to bring it down. Kill it. I do not care how.”

“My lord, the fell beasts cannot match the eagles at altitude —”

“They do not need to match them at altitude. The eagles must descend to enter the mountain. At low altitude, in the fumes and thermals above Orodruin, the battlefield is even. The Witch-king knows this. Send him. Now.”

He released the palantír. The light in the stone died.

DISCUSS ON SG

In a scrub oak on the western ridge above the valley, two crows sat on a branch and watched.

They were crebain, the black spy-birds of Dunland, large and clever and thoroughly unpleasant, with oily feathers and eyes like wet pebbles. They had been posted to this ridge six days ago, one of fourteen pairs stationed along the approaches to Rivendell, and they had spent those six days in a state of bored, malicious alertness, eating beetles and surveilling the comings and goings of the Elves below with the joyless diligence of creatures who serve darkness not out of conviction but out of a fundamental meanness of spirit that finds employment in darkness more natural than the alternative.

They had seen the eagle land the previous evening. They had taken note of it. They had thought nothing of it, of course, because eagles came and went from Rivendell with some regularity and the crows had not been briefed on what, specifically, to look for. They were told only to watch, and report, and be suspicious of everything, which came naturally to them.

But what they saw this morning was different. This was three great eagles, flying purposefully in formation at dawn, climbing hard and fast toward altitude, heading south. Even a crow could see that this was an event of some import, and perhaps even the reason they’d been sent here.

The first crow turned to the second and let out a series of harsh, rapid calls, the crebain’s equivalent of an alarm, a sound like a stick being dragged across a fence. The second crow took up the cry, louder, harsher, and together they launched themselves from the branch and flew upward, screaming into the brightening sky, circling and calling with a frantic, rasping urgency that carried far in the still morning air.

Far above them, so far above that the crows were invisible, mere specks against the grey-green earth, two dark flyers heard their cries.

The Nazgûl rode their fell beasts in a slow, wide patrol circuit above the southeastern approach to the valley, just as they had been ordered. They were high enough that the Elves below could not see them against the overcast, high enough that Elrond’s wards did not prickle and burn as they did at lower altitudes. The fell beasts were ancient, reptilian things, their vast leathery wings beating with a sound like wet canvas in a gale, they stank of carrion and old leather, and the Nazgûl upon their backs sat motionless as iron statues, only their hooded heads turning slowly, slowly, watching, and waiting.

They heard the crows before they saw anything. The crebain’s alarm carried upward through the cold air, shrill and insistent, and both Nazgûl turned their mounts toward the sound. The one called Ren, who in life had been a sorcerer of Harad and who retained, even in undeath, a certain professional attentiveness, extended his awareness downward to read the pattern of the crows’ distress, and then looked up higher, above the clouds.

He saw them.

Three bronze shapes, far to the south and climbing, already above the lowest cloud layer and pulling away with a speed that made the fell beasts’ labored flight look like the floundering of moths in honey. Eagles. Great Eagles, unmistakable even at this distance with their vast wingspans, the impossible speed of their ascent, and the way they caught the upper winds and floated on them like invisible rivers in the sky.

And from the lead eagle’s talon radiated an aura of power. It was a sensation that was more felt than seen.

The other Nazgûl felt it too. They turned to each other across the gap between their mounts, and between them passed a communication that was not language but something older and colder, a shared understanding that moved at the speed of dread.

The Ring.

Hoarmurath drove his fell beast upward, clawing for altitude. Ren followed. The fell beasts shrieked in protest, for they were creatures of the low airs, the murky thermals above battlefields and swamps, and the thin cold above the clouds was agony to them, but the will of the Nazgûl was irresistible and the beasts climbed, their wings beating faster, their reptilian lungs heaving in the thinning atmosphere.

But the eagles were already above them and pulling away. Gwaihir flew at the ceiling of the world, where the air was so thin that a Man would have lost consciousness in minutes, and his wings found purchase on winds that the fell beasts could not even reach. The gap between them widened, slowly, inexorably, the way dawn widens from a crack of light into the fullness of day.

Ren watched the eagles shrink against the depthless blue, and he knew that the fell beasts could not hope to catch them. Not in the open sky. Not at this altitude. They were built for strength, not for speed, and against the children of Thorondor they were as a carthorse to a king’s mount.

He raised one gauntleted hand and began to whisper.

The words were in the Black Speech, the language of Mordor, forged by Sauron in the dark years and spoken willingly by no living thing. The words flowed from Ren’s hood in a low, continuous hiss, like steam escaping from a crack in the earth, and the air around his outstretched hand darkened and thickened and began to hum with a frequency that was felt in the bones rather than heard in the ears. He cast a spell of far-speaking, a thread of dark will flung southward across hundreds of leagues toward the tower of Barad-dûr, toward one of the stones that could receive it, and it carried with it a single, urgent message:

They fly.

DISCUSS ON SG

The sun had not yet cleared the Misty Mountains when Gwaihir the Windlord stepped to the edge of the terrace and opened his wings.

It was, by any measure, an extraordinary sight. The Great Eagles of the Misty Mountains were the noblest of all flying creatures in Middle-earth, descended from Thorondor who had scarred the face of Morgoth himself in the Elder Days, and Gwaihir was the greatest of his line. With his wings outstretched, he was thirty fathoms from wingtip to wingtip, his plumage a deep tawny gold shading to white at the breast, his eyes like polished amber set in a head the size of a horse. When he spread his wings on the terrace of Rivendell, the displaced air bent the grass flat in a circle forty feet across and set the pennants on Elrond’s house snapping like whips.

He stood there for a moment in the grey predawn light, his talons gripping the stone at the terrace’s edge, and looked out over the valley of Imladris. Below him the Bruinen ran silver and dark between its wooded banks, and the waterfalls caught the first thin light and held it in long threads of white. The air smelled of pine and cold water and the faintest trace of the kitchens, where someone was already baking bread, because in Rivendell someone was always already baking bread.

On his left talon, buckled with straps of pale leather so fine they might have been spun from spider-silk, hung a pouch no larger than a man’s fist. It was beautiful work, Elvish leathercraft at its most meticulous, with every stitch placed with the precision of a jeweler, and it contained an object of such malice that even Gwaihir, whose mind was as far from the concerns of rings and power as a mind could be, felt a faint unease in the talon that held it. A warmth that had nothing to do with temperature. A weight that had nothing to do with mass.

He ignored it. He was a creature of air, not earth. It was a thing of great earthly power, but whatever it was, it could not touch him.

Behind him, on the terrace, stood Gandalf, leaning on his staff, and Elrond, and the Hobbit — the small one who had offered to carry the thing himself, and who watched now with an expression that Gwaihir, had he been inclined to read the faces of Halflings, might have identified as something between relief and a lingering, wistful sense of having been made unnecessary. Beside the Hobbit stood another, stouter Hobbit who was holding a packed breakfast and looking up at Gwaihir with the frank, uncomplicated awe of someone who has never in his life pretended to be unimpressed by anything.

Gandalf raised his staff. “Fly well, Windlord. Fly high and fly true!”

Gwaihir turned his great head and regarded the wizard with one amber eye. He did not speak — not here, not in the lesser tongues of the earthbound — but he dipped his beak once, a gesture of acknowledgment between peers, and then he stepped off the edge.

For one held breath he fell and dropped like a stone past the terrace’s edge, past the carved balustrades and the trailing ivy, down toward the rushing water far below. Then his wings caught the air and he rose. The downdraft of his ascent shook the trees on both banks of the Bruinen and sent a flock of starlings scattering like thrown seeds. He climbed in a great spiral, each turn carrying him higher, and the morning light found him as he broke above the tree line and caught the gold of his plumage and set it ablaze, so that for a moment he burned against the pale sky like a second dawn, like a fragment of the sun itself given wings and will and sent forth over the world.

It was a sight that even the ancient Elrond, who watched the great eagle’s departure from the balcony of his private residence, found magnificent.

Gwaihir climbed. The valley of Rivendell shrank beneath him. The house of Elrond became a cluster of rooftops among the trees, the Bruinen but a silver thread, the mountains a rumpled cloth of green and grey. The air thinned and cooled and he welcomed it, breathing deep of the upper atmosphere where the wind ran clean and fast and tasted of nothing but sky. He turned south and east, toward the distant shadow on the horizon that was, even from this height, even in the early light, unmistakable. Mordor.

He was not alone.

From the high eyries of the Misty Mountains, where the peaks rose above the snow line into the uttermost airs, two more shapes detached themselves and rose. Landroval, Gwaihir’s brother, and Meneldor the swift. Meneldor was younger and smaller than the others, but, as his name suggested, swift, perhaps faster in flight than any eagle living. They had been waiting since before dawn, perched on the bare rock above the clouds, and now they fell into formation on either side of Gwaihir in a wide arrowhead, three golden shapes climbing in unison toward the roof of the sky.

This was Gandalf’s addition to the plan. Not one eagle but three — an escort, a guard of honor, a redundancy. If one were forced to turn aside, another could take the pouch. If the Nazgûl came, then two could fight them while the Windlord flew on. It was, Gandalf had argued, simple prudence. Gwaihir had accepted this reasoning with the tolerant patience of a creature who did not believe he required any assistance but understood that wizards always needed to feel useful.

The three eagles rose through a thin layer of cloud and emerged above it into a world of blinding white and depthless blue, and they turned their faces toward the East, and they rose higher into the sky.

DISCUSS ON SG

• A Tale of the Council of Elrond
• In the Tower of Barad-dûr
• The Word of the Lord of Barad-dûr

“The Witch-king proposes an assault,” said Khamûl. “A direct strike on Imladris. The full strength of the Nine, supported by two battalions from Dol Guldur and whatever host Saruman can muster from the south. The Witch-king believes that Rivendell’s defenses, while formidable, have not been tested by true military force in —”

“No.”

The word was quiet, but it filled the room the way darkness fills a cellar, completely and without effort. Khamûl fell silent.

Sauron rose from his chair and walked to the fire. He stood with his back to the room, looking into the flames, and the flames, one might have noticed, were not reflected in his eyes. Something older burned there.

“An assault on Rivendell is precisely what Elrond would want,” he said. “It is what Gandalf expects. They are not fools, Khamûl. Rivendell is a fortress of the spirit as much as of stone. The valley itself resists the Shadow — the Bruinen obeys Elrond, the passes are warded with arts that predate the founding of Mordor. An assault would cost us thousands of Orcs, at least three Nazgûl, and months of preparation, and even then success would not be certain. And while we spent our strength against those waterfalls and singing stones, Gondor would have time to marshal, Rohan would consolidate, and every petty lord from Dol Amroth to the Iron Hills would take heart. No. We will not assault Rivendell.”

“Then what does the Dark Lord command?”

Sauron turned from the fire. “The crebain. Saruman’s crows answer to him, but they will answer to me as well, and in any case the birds will do as they are told. I want crows over the Misty Mountains, crows over every pass and path between Rivendell and the south. I want to know what moves in and out of that valley — every rider, every company, every cursed halfing with a walking stick. Nothing leaves Imladris without my knowledge.”

“Anything else?”

“Two of the Nine, on their winged mounts, from a rotation of six. High patrol; they should not stoop low enough to provoke Elrond into a response, but close enough to see who travels in and out of Rivendell. They are to observe. They are not to engage. If they see the Ring-bearer moving, they report. They shall not attack. Not yet.”

“The Witch-king will find this response to be… restrained.”

“The Witch-king will find this wise, once he has thought about it for more than the three seconds he typically devotes to reflection. You may tell him the Lord of Barad-dûr said so.”

Khamûl bowed deeply and departed. The door closed behind him with a sound like a coffin lid settling uneasily into position.

Sauron stood by the fire a moment longer, then returned to his chair. Lúthiel had moved her knight while he was away from the table. He noticed this but said nothing. She cheated only when the position was already lost, and he found the habit endearing in a way he suspected said something unflattering about his character.

“You are concerned,” she said. It was not a question.

“I am thinking.”

He looked at the chessboard, but his eyes were not on the pieces. They were somewhere far to the west, in a valley of green and gold where his enemies were, at this very moment, deciding how to move against him.

“The Ring is in Rivendell,” he said. “And in Rivendell there are gathered, if Khamûl’s report is accurate — and it is at least partially accurate, which for Khamûl is exceptional — the Halfling who carried the Ring from the Shire, Gandalf, Elrond, and almost certainly representatives of the Dwarves and the men of the North. A council. They will be debating what to do with it.”

“And what will they do with it?”

“That is the question.” He moved a pawn, absently. “They cannot hide it. The Ring calls to me; wherever it rests, I will find it in time. They know this. They cannot unmake it by any ordinary means — Elrond knows this better than anyone, having watched Isildur refuse to cast it into the fire when he had the chance. So they must either wield it or destroy it.”

“And you think they will wield it.”

“I think they will be tempted.” He leaned back and pressed his fingertips together — nine fingers forming an incomplete arch. “The question is: who? Who among them has both the power to use the Ring effectively and the arrogance to believe they can control it?”

He was quiet for a time. The fire crackled. Lúthiel waited. She was, among her many virtues, an exceptional waiter.

“Elrond will not take it,” said Sauron. “He is too cautious. He remembers what happened with Isildur, and he has spent three thousand years being cautious as a form of penance for not having physically shoved Isildur into the fire when he had the chance, which, between us, he probably should have done. Elrond will counsel destruction. He will be right, and he will be ignored.”

“The Dwarf lords?”

“Dwarves are resistant to the Ring’s deeper corruptions — their minds are stone, slow to turn. But for the same reason, they cannot wield it with the subtlety it requires. A Dwarf with the One Ring would simply become a more stubborn Dwarf, which is a terrifying concept in its own right but not a strategic threat. No. Not the Dwarves.”

“The Halfling.”

“A carrier. A postman. The Ring chose him for proximity, not for power. He is no more capable of wielding the Ring against me than a sparrow is of wielding a siege engine. The Ring would eat him alive within a week.”

“Then who?”

Sauron’s eyes narrowed. “There is a Man in the north — Aragorn, they call him. Isildur’s heir. The last of the Númenórean line. He has power in his blood, old power, and the Ring would know it. The Ring would sing to him of kingship, of the throne of Gondor restored, of the Reunited Kingdom. He is dangerous.” He paused. “But he is also a Ranger. He has spent his life in the wild, deliberately avoiding power. A man who has refused the throne for sixty years is unlikely to suddenly decided to seize it through a weapon of the Enemy. Aragorn is not the threat.”

He fell silent, and the silence lengthened, and Lúthiel watched him arrive at the answer she suspected he had known since Khamûl opened his mouth.

“Gandalf,” said Sauron.

He said the name the way one says the name of an old colleague who has made a career of being underestimated and whose modesty one has never for a moment believed.

“Gandalf,” he repeated. “He is a Maia. My equal in nature, if not in craft. He has walked Middle-earth for two thousand years in the shape of an old man, pretending to be less than he is, playing the advisor, the wanderer, the friend of Hobbits and the lighter of fireworks. But he is a spirit of fire, and the Ring would amplify that fire a hundredfold. With the One Ring, Gandalf could challenge me directly. He could raise the Free Peoples not merely as a counselor but as a commander, and transform them into a power to rival this Dark Tower itself.”

“And his eagle,” said Lúthiel.

Sauron made a dismissive gesture. “Couriers and carriers. The eagles are proud creatures. They do favors for Gandalf out of old debts and older vanity, but they will not commit to a war on his behalf. Manwë’s birds have not intervened in the affairs of Middle-earth in any sustained fashion since the War of Wrath, and that was under direct instruction from the Valar. No. Gwaihir carried Gandalf out of Orthanc because it cost him nothing and flattered his self-regard. He cannot carry an army.”

“Would Gandalf take it?”

Sauron considered this with the seriousness it deserved. “He would tell himself he was taking it reluctantly. He would tell himself it was necessary — especially in light of Saruman coming over to me —that no one else could bear the burden, that he alone had the wisdom to wield it without being corrupted. He would be wrong, of course. They are always wrong. But he would believe it, and that belief is all the Ring needs.”

He moved his queen. “That is the danger. Not a warrior riding to my gates with the Ring on his finger. Gandalf. Working quietly, building alliances, using the Ring’s power to unite and strengthen and inspire, until one day I look west and find not a scattered collection of failing kingdoms but a single, coordinated force led by a Maia with the power of the One Ring and the submission of every once-free creature in Middle-earth.”

He studied the board. Lúthiel’s position was, despite her clandestine knight maneuver, quite hopeless. He could see checkmate in eleven moves.

“That,” said Sauron, “is what I must prevent.”

Lúthiel moved her rook. It was the wrong move, but she made it with great confidence, which he admired.

“And the crows and the Nazgûl patrol?” she said. “That will be enough?”

“For now. Gandalf is patient, but he is not infinitely patient. He will move soon, most likely within weeks, not months. And when he does, when he leaves that valley with the Ring, my servants will see him. And that is when I will strike.”

He took her rook with his bishop. “Your position is untenable, incidentally.”

She looked at the board, looked at him, and tipped over her king with one pale finger.

“Again?” she said.

“Again.”

She began resetting the pieces, bone-white and volcanic glass, and Sauron the Great, Lord of Mordor, Enemy of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth, settled into his chair and permitted himself a small, private smile. He had been outmaneuvered before. He had been defeated before. He did not intend to let it happen again. The Ring was once more in play, and the game — the true game, the one that mattered — was only beginning.

Outside the tower, far below, the plains of Gorgoroth stretched away under a sky of smoke and ember, and somewhere in the darkness, a large flock of crebain turned their black eyes westward and began to fly.

DISCUSS ON SG

The library of Barad-dûr was not what most people would have expected, had most people been in a position to expect anything about it at all, which they were not, on account of being either dead or very far away and deeply committed to remaining so. It occupied the forty-third level of the Dark Tower, well below the great Eye’s chamber but far above the barracks and forges and pits where the common business of Mordor was conducted, and it was — there was no other word for it — comfortable.

The walls were black stone, naturally, but they had been hung with tapestries of deep crimson and charcoal grey, woven by captive artisans of considerable skill who had been treated quite well during their employment and then released to the interior settlements of Nurn, where they now ran a moderately successful textile cooperative. The shelves rose from floor to ceiling, carved from the dark wood of trees that grew in the sheltered vales south of the Ephel Dúath, and they held thousands of volumes — histories, treatises on metallurgy and linguistics, the collected philosophical works of the Second Age, several illustrated atlases of Middle Earth, and a modest but well-curated collection of erotic Sindarin poetry that Sauron would have denied owning if asked, which, of course, no one ever did.

A fire burned in a grate of black iron. Two chairs of dark leather faced each other across a table of polished obsidian, upon which a chess set had been arranged. The pieces were exquisite — one set carved from white bone, the other from volcanic glass — and the game was already underway.

Sauron sat in the chair to the left of the fire. He was not, at this moment, wearing the form of the great Eye, which he customarily maintained in the upper chamber by a combination of will and ancient sorcery and which he found, frankly, exhausting. In his library he preferred a more practical shape: tall, severe, dark-haired, with the handsome and slightly drawn features of a man who has been awake for several thousand years and finds the whole thing rather tedious. He wore a robe of black silk and no crown. His right hand, the one missing the finger where the Ring had once sat, rested on the arm of his chair. He had never bothered to restore it. He found that its absence tended to focus his mind rather helpfully when he found himself gravitating toward sloth.

Across from him, studying the board with an intensity that he found genuinely charming, sat Lúthiel.

She had been an Elf of Eregion, once. She was of Celebrimbor’s people, a seamstress of great talent who had worked alongside Sauron himself in his Annatar days, when he had walked among the Elves in a fairer form and taught them the craft of ring-making. She had seen through him long before the others. She had known perfectly well what he was. And she had, after a period of considerable internal deliberation that had lasted approximately three centuries, decided that it did not bother her. Indeed, much to the contrary, she found herself drawn to his darkness.

This was not, Sauron reflected, as uncommon as the histories of the Elves would have one believe. The Eldar presented themselves as uniformly noble, but immortality did strange things to those upon whom it was bestowed. Lúthiel had simply grown bored with virtue. She was not evil, at least, not by his standards. She had no interest in dominion or cruelty or the subjugation of peoples. She was merely done with the relentless earnestness of Elvish civilization, the repetitive songs about starlight, and the interminable councils about the proper stewardship of forests. She wanted to read interesting books and play chess with someone who could keep up with her, and Sauron, whatever his other failings might be, had always provided her with exceptional company.

She also liked wargs. A lot. To a degree that Sauron found almost disturbing. The orcs of Mordor knew her, and feared her, as Hiriel the Huntress, due to her habit of riding a very large pack leader at the head of a voracious pack and hunting orcs, goblins, and, Sauron suspected, the occasional Easterling.

She moved her bone-white bishop three squares. “Check,” she declared happily, looking pleased with herself.

Sauron looked at the board. She was right. His king was exposed along the diagonal, and her rook, previously blocked by the bishop, now commanded the entire file. He studied the position for a moment, then moved his king behind a pawn with a faint nod of acknowledgment.

“You are improving,” he said.

“I have been improving for nine hundred years. You might at least pretend to be threatened.”

“My king is in danger. That bishop maneuver was —”

There was a knock at the door. Three sharp raps, then silence. It was the knock of someone who had been taught precisely how to knock at this particular door and understood the negative consequences of improvisation.

“Enter,” said Sauron.

The door opened and a Nazgûl came in. It was not the Witch-king. From the figure entering emanated the pale, ephemeral menace of Khamûl the Easterling, the third of the Nine. He was still wearing his full kit of black robes, iron crown, and gauntlets, which meant he had come directly from the field and had not thought to change, which meant the news was either urgent or Khamûl had once again failed to grasp the concept of appropriate attire for different contexts. Sauron assumed the former.

“My lord,” said Khamûl. His voice came from the hood like wind through a keyhole. “I bring word from the western watches.”

“Speak.”

Khamûl glanced at Lúthiel. Sauron did not tell her to leave, and the Nazgûl had learned, over the centuries, that Lúthiel’s presence was a permanent feature of the library and that any question concerning her right to be there would be met with a decidedly negative response. Khamûl turned back to his master.

“Saruman’s prisoner has escaped. The wizard Gandalf — he was held atop Orthanc. He is gone.”

Sauron’s expression did not change, but his hand, the complete one, closed slowly around the arm of his chair. “How did this happen?”

“We are uncertain of the precise details. Saruman was reluctant to admit the wizard’s escape and his report was… incomplete. But our watchers in the mountains saw it clearly enough. An eagle, one of the skylords of the Misty Mountains, descended upon the tower of Orthanc and bore Gandalf away through the air.”

Sauron was quiet for a moment. “Which one?”

“Gwaihir, my lord. The Windlord. He carried Gandalf north and east at great speed. Our crebain tracked them as far as the upper vales of the Anduin before losing sight. It appears the eagle delivered him directly to Rivendell.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“And you are telling me now?”

Khamûl shifted almost imperceptibly. The Nazgûl did not fidget — their bodies were too far past the threshold of ordinary physical response for anything so human — but there was something in the movement that served the same function. “As I said, Saruman was evasive, and so we wished to confirm the wizard’s escape rather than bring you false news, my lord. And there is more. The Halfling — the Ringbearer — we pursued him on horseback to the very borders of Rivendell but we were unable to cross the Bruinen.” The barest hint of resentment entered Khamûl’s voice. “The river rose against us.”

“Yes,” said Sauron. “It does that.”

He was quiet for a moment. Across the table, Lúthiel had returned her attention to the chessboard with the pointed discretion of someone who has lived long enough to know when to appear as if one has heard nothing.

“So,” said Sauron. “Gandalf is free. Gandalf has the Halfling. The Halfling has the Ring. And all three are in Rivendell, under the protection of Elrond.”

Saruman had failed. So, too, had the Nine. Sauron closed his eyes and repressed the urge to remove the iron crown from Khamûl’s head and force his entire body to pass through it in a very violent and painful manner.

He was not a happy dark lord.

• The Word of the Lord of Barad-dûr

DISCUSS ON SG

The morning light fell upon Rivendell like a benediction, gold and pale through the leaves of the ancient trees, and the sound of waterfalls threaded through the air like music half-remembered. The council had been called in the great terrace overlooking the valley, and representatives of every Free People sat arranged in a wide crescent of carved chairs. Elves of Rivendell and the Woodland Realm, Dwarves from Erebor, Men of Gondor and the wild North, and a Hobbit who looked as if he very much wished he were anywhere else.

Frodo Baggins sat in a chair that was slightly too tall for him and tried not to let his feet swing. Beside him, Gandalf the Grey leaned on his staff and surveyed the assembly with an expression Frodo had learned, over many months, to associate with a man who has already made up his mind but intends to let everyone else talk themselves into exhaustion first.

Elrond Half-elven stood and opened the proceedings with a history of the Ring. He spoke at considerable length. He spoke of Sauron’s forging of the One in the fires of Orodruin, of the Last Alliance and the fall of Gil-galad, of Isildur’s bane and the creature Gollum and the extraordinary improbability of the Ring passing to a Hobbit of the Shire. He spoke with the unhurried gravity of someone who has lived six thousand years and sees no reason to abridge.

Boromir, son of Denethor, shifted in his seat. He had ridden many weeks from Minas Tirith and was not accustomed to being a member of an audience.

“Let us use the Ring against Sauron,” he said, at the first breath Elrond drew. “Give it to the armies of Gondor and let us —”

“No,” said Elrond.

“But —”

“No.”

Gandalf lifted one hand. “Boromir. The Ring answers to Sauron alone. Any who wield it will be consumed by it. It cannot be used. It can only be destroyed.”

“And it can only be destroyed in the place where it was made,” said Elrond. “In the fires of Mount Doom, in the land of Mordor.”

A silence followed this pronouncement — or rather, a silence attempted to follow it, but was immediately interrupted by several people speaking at once. Gimli the Dwarf suggested that they simply smash the thing with an axe, but when this was attempted, the axe shattered spectacularly and Gimli sat down again looking more than a little chagrined. Legolas mentioned that the Elves would never be safe while the Ring endured. Boromir brought up Gondor’s need again, and once more, everyone ignored him.

Through all of this, Frodo felt the Ring against his chest, hanging on its chain, and a strange certainty had been growing in him since before the council began. It was the kind of certainty that arrives not as a comfort but as a weight, pressing down on the shoulders with quiet and terrible patience. He knew, with a clarity that surprised him, what he was going to say. He had known it, perhaps, since Weathertop, or since the Ford, or since the day Bilbo had given him the Ring and gone away.

He stood up.

“I will take the Ring to Mordor.”

The words fell into the assembly like a stone into a pond. Frodo felt every eye turn to him — the tall, ageless eyes of the Elves, the shrewd eyes of the Dwarves, the complicated eyes of Aragorn, the frankly skeptical eyes of Boromir. He drew a breath. His voice, when it came again, was small but steady.

“I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though I do not know the way.”

He stood there in the silence that followed, three feet six inches of determination, and waited for someone to say something. The moment stretched. Gandalf was looking at him with an expression that was not quite pity and not quite admiration and was, if Frodo was reading it correctly, largely preoccupied with something else entirely.

“That is a very noble offer, Frodo,” said Gandalf.

“Thank you,” said Frodo.

“Very noble. Very brave. And completely unnecessary.”

Frodo blinked. “I’m sorry?”

Gandalf rose from his seat and addressed the council with the air of a man who has been waiting for exactly the right moment and is rather pleased with himself for having found it.

“My friends,” he said. “As many of you know, I was recently imprisoned atop the tower of Orthanc by Saruman the White, who has turned to darkness and now serves the Enemy. I was rescued from that imprisonment by Gwaihir the Windlord, the chieftan of the Eagles of the Misty Mountains.”

“We are aware,” said Elrond, with the faintest trace of impatience.

“Gwaihir bore me through the sky at tremendous speed,” Gandalf continued, as if Elrond had not spoken. “From Orthanc to the fields of Rohan in a matter of hours. A journey that would take a company on foot many weeks, if not months, and which would require passage through some of the most dangerous territory in Middle-earth.”

He paused and looked around the council with bright, expectant eyes.

“The distance from here to Mordor is approximately four hundred leagues,” he said. “On foot, through the wilderness, over mountains and through marshes, past enemy fortifications and patrolled borders, the journey would take months. It would be fraught with danger at every step. The Ring-bearer would need a company of protectors. Even then, the odds of success would be vanishingly small.”

Aragorn was watching Gandalf with an expression of dawning comprehension. Frodo was watching him with an expression of dawning alarm.

“Gwaihir,” said Gandalf, “can fly four hundred leagues in less than a day.”

The silence that followed this statement was qualitatively different from the silences that had preceded it. It was the silence of an idea so obvious that everyone present was rapidly calculating whether they could claim to have thought of it first.

“The eagles,” said Elrond.

“The eagles,” said Gandalf.

“Gandalf,” said Frodo, and there was a faint note of desperation in his voice that he was not entirely proud of. “I said that I would take the Ring. I have offered to bear it.”

“And it was a magnificent offer,” said Gandalf warmly. “Truly. The courage of Hobbits never ceases to amaze me. But consider, Frodo — you would walk for months through trackless wilderness, facing Ringwraiths and Orcs and untold hardship, when instead we might simply have the Ring flown directly to Mount Doom in the span of an afternoon.”

“But surely,” said Boromir, who had been growing increasingly restless, “the Enemy would see an eagle approaching. His Eye watches from the tower of Barad-dûr. The Nazgûl ride fell beasts through the air. An eagle would be spotted and intercepted.”

Gandalf smiled. “Gwaihir flies higher than any fell beast can reach. The eagles are creatures of the high airs, the uttermost peaks. The Nazgûl patrol the lower skies on their winged mounts, but they cannot match the altitude or speed of one of the Great Eagles. Gwaihir could fly above the very clouds, invisible from below, and descend upon Orodruin before Sauron could muster his response.”

“But the entrance,” said Gimli, who was a practical sort. “The Sammath Naur — the Crack of Doom — it is within the mountain. Can an eagle enter it?”

Every head turned to Elrond. The lord of Rivendell was quiet for a long moment. His eyes had gone distant, as they did when he was consulting the vast and impeccably organized archive of his memory.

“I have been to Orodruin,” he said at last. “I stood at the threshold of the Sammath Naur with Isildur after the fall of Sauron. I recall the entrance well.” He paused. “It is wide. Very wide. It was carved — or rather, torn open — by volcanic force. The passage into the mountain is high-vaulted and broad. An eagle, even one of the Great Eagles, with a wingspan of some thirty fathoms —” He paused again, and there was something almost reluctant in his voice, as if he would have preferred the logistics to be more complicated. “An eagle could enter it. With room to spare.”

“There you are,” said Gandalf.

Frodo sat down slowly. He was experiencing an emotion he could not quite name — something between relief and an obscure sense of redundancy, as if he had spent weeks steeling himself to lift a great boulder only to watch someone roll it aside with a lever.

“I should like to ride the eagle,” said Aragorn. “I can bear the Ring.”

This declaration produced another brief silence, though of a different character. Aragorn, heir of Isildur, Chieftain of the Dúnedain, sat straight-backed in his chair with the composed dignity of a man who has spent decades wandering the wild places of the world in deliberate preparation for a moment of destiny and does not intend to be left out of it on a technicality.

“Someone must ensure that the Ring is cast into the fire,” he said. “The eagle cannot do it alone. It has no hands. I will ride Gwaihir into Mordor, bearing the Ring, and throw it into the Crack of Doom myself.”

“A brave proposal and one well worthy of your line,” said Gandalf. “But consider: you are the heir of Isildur. Isildur himself could not resist the Ring’s call. The Ring would know you. It would whisper to you of the throne of Gondor, of the reunited kingdoms, of your right to rule Middle Earth. The temptation, for you above all others, would be —”

“I can resist it,” said Aragorn firmly.

“With all respect, my son,” said Elrond, and the phrase carried the particular weight it always does when spoken by someone who has watched civilizations rise and fall, “that is what Isildur thought too.”

Aragorn’s jaw tightened, but he did not argue further and nodded in silent acquiescence. He knew the history as well as anyone.

“This raises the essential question,” said Gandalf. “Who — or what — should bear the Ring on this flight? The great advantage of the eagle is not merely its speed. It is resistance. Gwaihir is not a creature of ambition. He desires no kingdom, no power, no dominion over others. He is a bird. An exceedingly large and noble bird, to be sure, but a bird nonetheless. The Ring’s power lies in its appeal to the will — to the desire for mastery. What does an eagle desire? Updrafts. Thermals. The occasional mountain goat. The Ring would have very little purchase on such a mind.”

“You are suggesting,” said Elrond, “that we tie the Ring to an eagle’s leg and let it fly unaccompanied into the heart of Mordor?”

“I am suggesting,” said Gandalf, “that we place the Ring in a pouch secured to Gwaihir’s talons, and that Gwaihir fly at maximum altitude directly to Orodruin, enter the Sammath Naur, and release the pouch into the fire. The entire operation need take no more than six hours.”

“And if the Ring tempts the eagle to turn aside?” asked Legolas.

“To what end?” said Gandalf. “What would the Ring promise an eagle? Dominion over the skies? Gwaihir already has that. A hoard of gold? Eagles have no use for gold. An army of servants? Eagles are solitary creatures who find the company of most other beings tedious. The Ring’s entire mechanism of corruption depends on exploiting desire, and the desires of an eagle are so thoroughly alien to the desires of the Ring’s maker that the two are, for all practical purposes, incompatible.”

“The wind does not desire a crown,” murmured Elrond, and something in his ancient voice suggested that he was quite taken with the elegance of this.

“But the Quest,” said Frodo. He was aware that his voice sounded rather small. “The journey. The sacrifice. Bilbo always said that adventures were the making of a Hobbit —”

“Bilbo,” said Gandalf gently, “also said that adventures made you late for dinner. I think, Frodo, that in this case, being home in time for dinner is rather the point.”

Sam Gamgee, who had been lurking behind a pillar in open defiance of the council’s protocols, leaned forward and whispered, “He’s got you there, Mr. Frodo.”

Frodo looked around the council one last time. He saw the faces of the great and the wise, the warriors and the kings, and on every one of them he saw the same expression: the faintly embarrassed recognition that the answer had been, all along, absurdly simple.

“Then it is decided,” said Elrond, rising. “Gwaihir the Windlord shall bear the One Ring to Orodruin. Gandalf shall speak with him and make the arrangements. The Ring shall be secured to his person by means yet to be determined — I suggest we consult with the leatherworkers of my household — and he shall depart at first light tomorrow.”

“And the rest of us?” said Boromir, who looked as if he had been cheated of something but was not entirely sure what.

“The rest of us,” said Elrond, “shall wait.”

“I hate waiting,” said Gimli.

“You may pass the time in my halls,” said Elrond. “The kitchens are beyond compare. The library is extensive. The gardens are in late bloom.”

“I was willing to carry the Ring,” said Frodo quietly, to no one in particular.

Gandalf placed a hand on his shoulder. “And that willingness, Frodo, is precisely why you were the right Hobbit to offer. The courage to give one’s life is no less real for being, in the end, unnecessary. You would have carried the Ring all the way to Mordor on foot, through fire and darkness, and that is a thing worth honoring.”

“But you’re not going to let me.”

“No. Most certainly not.”

Frodo looked up at the sky, where high above the valley of Rivendell, a distant shape circled on broad wings in the morning light. It was Gwaihir, called by some means that Gandalf had no doubt arranged in advance, already descending toward the terrace with the unhurried confidence of a creature who has never in his long life had reason to fear anything below him.

“Right,” said Frodo. “Well. I suppose I’ll have another cup of tea, then.”

And the council, having solved in a single morning the problem that would have otherwise consumed the better part of a year and the lives of a considerable number of good people, adjourned for an early lunch.

• In the Tower of Barad-dûr

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